Jack Kerouac’s 30 tips for life and prose

March 24, 2015 by Faena Aleph

A beautiful set of tips for your everyday life and your automatic writing.

Jack Kerouac, the indefatigable beat novelist, left a kind of legacy of a “literary lifestyle.” Each of its stories contained a healthy ingredient of anecdotes from his life. And perhaps in that same tonic he also wrote a list of 30 beliefs and techniques for life and prose. Legend has it he wrote it in Allen Ginsberg’s hotel in North Beach a year before that poet and fellow beat would write ‘Howl,’ his great poem of the US literary landscape.

The list evokes the Kerouac of The Dharma Bums, an athlete of words bewitched by Buddhism. At times he is almost an avatar of Li Po, the poet of drunkenness, and at others a kind of Zen quarterback. Jack Kerouac teaches us to release the handbrake so as to allow the dynamo of language to flow; those clear bursts of sparkling light; the spirit on automatic and fearless.

Image: Jack Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky horsing around on the beach, Tangier. From the Allen Ginsberg Collection of Photographs.

Jack Kerouac, the indefatigable beat novelist, left a kind of legacy of a “literary lifestyle.” Each of its stories contained a healthy ingredient of anecdotes from his life. And perhaps in that same tonic he also wrote a list of 30 beliefs and techniques for life and prose. Legend has it he wrote it in Allen Ginsberg’s hotel in North Beach a year before that poet and fellow beat would write ‘Howl,’ his great poem of the US literary landscape.

The list evokes the Kerouac of The Dharma Bums, an athlete of words bewitched by Buddhism. At times he is almost an avatar of Li Po, the poet of drunkenness, and at others a kind of Zen quarterback. Jack Kerouac teaches us to release the handbrake so as to allow the dynamo of language to flow; those clear bursts of sparkling light; the spirit on automatic and fearless.